“I try not to sit here for too long these days, it is depressing,” said PD Sathish Chandra, at the entrance of the Kengal Hanumanthaiah Kalasoudha, a 300-seater auditorium in south Bengaluru. Chandra is the director of Prakasam Trust which had leased Kalasoudha from the city’s municipal corporation, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, in 2009. Today, after eight years of running it as a vibrant space for Kannada theatre, Chandra is packing his bags. The corporation wants to bump up the rent from Rs 10,000 to Rs 40,000 a month, a hike he simply cannot afford.
“They also asked me to pay up arrears amounting to Rs 7 lakh all of a sudden,” said Chandra. “I cannot afford that kind of money. My aim has been to ensure this space is affordable to both theatre-goers and artists. A higher rent for me would automatically mean a higher rent for theatre groups that perform here. No one can afford that.”
When the civic body announced its decision in February, Chandra, who works at a radio station and as a television producer, first chose not to publicise it. He did not want to play the victim. However, urged by his team, he wrote a post on Facebook in the first week of July to tell people about Kalasoudha’s future. Before he knew it, artists, theatre enthusiasts and residents of Bengaluru were pledging support to retain Kalasoudha in its current affordable avatar.
“See, in a sense, this is like arguing with the owner of your house who wants to raise the rent,” said Chandra. “I wasn’t sure what the right course of action should be. Procedurally and legally speaking, there is nothing wrong with the corporation’s decision. But the question is whether there is a moral obligation to protect spaces of art and culture instead of treating them too as other pieces of real estate.”
As Chandra’s Facebook post made the rounds, Kannada actor Achyuth Kumar suggested to him that as a form of protest, performances be organised every day at the Kalasoudha premises in Hanumanthanagar. That idea found resonance – for ten days, theatre groups performed at the space every evening. Meanwhile, Chandra launched a petition on Change.org, and recorded messages from film actors and theatre directors, all urging the municipality to save the cultural space in its present form. To a degree, he did find success. His efforts created enough noise to finally warrant a meeting with the joint commissioner of the corporation and the mayor.
“During the first meeting on July 17, representatives from the corporation did not show up,” said Chandra. “The next day, they turned up with two prospective bidders – one of them runs a start-up and the other is from the film industry. All these years, I was the only bidder. The corporation has now informed me that there will be a fresh bid in August and the lease will go to the highest bidder. I plan to participate but I definitely cannot afford the competitive price which I expect will be on the lines of what the corporation had asked me to pay. Perhaps, even more than that.”
For now, Chandra is vacating his office at the Kalasoudha.
“This is the last of what was left in my office here,” he said, pointing to cartons that were full of posters, stationery, and images of gods and goddesses torn down from the office walls. Behind him Kalasoudha too wore a distraught look. The lights inside the auditorium were last switched on in February. The staircase and the inner entrance to the auditorium resembled a mini-battlefield, with pamphlets, banners, upturned chairs and empty cardboard boxes strewn around. Once brimming with people every week, Kalasoudha had fallen awfully quiet, plunged in darkness and stripped of flavour.
The Kengal Hanumanthaiah Kalasoudha, built in 2003, occupied a prized spot in Bengaluru’s theatre landscape, primarily because local theatre groups found it affordable when compared to other such spaces in the city. Prakasam Trust would charge them Rs 3,000 for a day during the week and Rs 5,000 on weekends.
Predictably then, its closure since February left artists furious.
“Why are they messing with it when it was running just fine?” asked Rajendra Karanth, a noted theatre person and actor. “On the one hand, the Department of Kannada and Culture says it wants to promote theatre. It allocates new funds and schemes to promote it too. On the other hand, the local corporation shuts down a thriving theatre space simply because it wants to increase rent. What is this contradictory approach?”
Another reason for the ire is the paucity of theatre spaces in Bengaluru – Kalasoudha was among the very few.
“The city Townhall, which has a seating capacity of 30,000, was never meant for theatre,” explained Karanth. “An artist on stage can only hear his voice echo multiple times. Ravindra Kalakshetra, which is close to the Townhall, has become a space that is barely accessible to theatre persons. If there is a political meeting for instance, theatre groups will have to vacate the premises without any notice. There is a small open-air theatre behind it but that’s for artists who can shout beyond the voices coming from inside the Kalakshetra in order to be heard. Ranga Shankara, run and owned by actor Arundhati Nag, while it is doing immensely useful work to promote theatre, is hard-pressed to accommodate newcomers and local artists. Kalasoudha was the space that was most accessible to local theatre groups.”
Artists feel that even if the corporation wants to hand over Kalasoudha to another trust or company, a bid is not the way to go about it.
“Instead of subsidising art, the corporation seems to want to profit from it,” said Lakshmi Chandrashekhar, a veteran actor and theatre person. “In adopting the bidding process as their means to choose the next person to run the Kalasoudha, they are treating the space like any other piece of property. Will the bidding process take into account the intention of a bidder, for instance? If Kalasoudha has to remain a sacred space for theatre, then it has to be run by someone with an unflinching commitment towards theatre. How will a bid ensure that?”
“I’m worried that among the candidates that have come forward right now, the start-up owner might be compelled to give the space out for corporate events,” she added. “The other candidate is from the film directors’ guild. For them, Kalasoudha could just be another office building.”
Chandra pointed out that the civic body’s tender invitation stipulates that the turnover of the bidder’s company should not be less than Rs 1 crore. “Which theatre group or enthusiast will have that kind of money?” asked Chandra.
The recurring plea across groups of artists is to leave Kalasoudha alone. The municipal corporation has other sources of income, they say.
In many ways, the fight for Kalasoudha has become less about this one structure and more about ceding of spaces of art to profits and commercialisation. It beggars the questions: what is the value of a cultural space in a city, and can it be weighed like any piece of realty?
“It is alright to look for a new organisation to run the place,” said Karanth. “But running a theatre space is not just about receiving booking advances. The Prakasam Trust and the artists who have performed here have built its reputation from scratch, reached out to audiences and getting them to come regularly to the space.”
Chandra recounted how he would go door-to-door to inform people about the productions in Kalasoudha. Karanth recalled fights in the lobby of the auditorium when tickets were sold out – “on a weekday,” he added.
“A theatre space is not just a building,” said Achyuth Kumar, a popular actor. “It inspires new productions, creates artists and nurtures newer experiments. How can one peg a price onto that? Art forms are shaped by passion. One cannot look at spaces that house such art forms from a commercial point of view. If you do that, then the space cannot host art.”
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